If your latest track were a tiktok meme, which one would it be – and why?
the guy with the conspiracy board and the red string going everywhere. except the string is real. it’s all connected, i just have the receipts.
what image (or mental reel) best describes your sound?
two waves meeting on water. the place where they cancel and the place where they double. a body standing exactly on a border, in both countries at once.
what’s the most absurd place where a track idea has ever come to you?
a dentist’s chair. mouth open, couldn’t write it down. hummed the line into the suction tube and prayed i’d remember it. i did.
if you had to take a line from one of your recent dms as a song title – what would it be?
„no worries if not.“
the most honest sentence anyone sends. a whole feeling folded into four words and a lie.
your sound as an emoji – which one is it and why?
〰️ — a wave. sound is just pressure moving through a room.
tell me about your biggest studio fail and how you fixed it.
Biggest studio fail? None. Every mistake, every misstep hsaa lead me here. Having understood that since the beginning, I let it show me where i’m headed. Sorry, sounds pretentious but that’s how you dont suffer, that’s how you allow tge unseen/subconsious reveal itself.
what was your „this is more than a hobby“ moment?
the first time i sang at an open mic in the haight-ashbury, in san francisco. I waited for 5 hrs for my turn. it went completely quiet-something in the room changed- and it changed my trajectory. I called my parents and saaaid, uh dont think i’m gonn abe surgeon…
has there ever been a track you loved that everyone else hated?
Im sure! But aalso, i love tracks that I hate thta others love becaause it forces mee to analyze why and then it teaches me aaout music that resonates with masses.
which gig completely threw you off track – in the best or worst way?
a show where the pa cut out mid-set. dead silence. i finished the song unamplified, voice only, and the whole room leaned in instead of leaving. i learned that night that the silence is part of the instrument.
which sound effect makes you weak every single time?
not gonna lie- taiko drums. you feel the hit in your chest a fraction before your ears catch up. the body hears it first. nothing else does that to me.
which current trend in the scene annoys you – and which inspires you?
annoys: music built backwards from a fifteen-second hook to feed a feed. the song as bait.
inspires: artists releasing long, slow, difficult work anyway. people who still trust an audience to sit with something.
what needs to change to make it easier for newcomers to enter the scene?
money. the quiet truth is you almost need a safety net to survive being „emerging.“ so much of the work is unpaid and invisible. pay people. share the infrastructure instead of hoarding it. Music is a kind of necessity and of value.
if you could reinvent a club or festival from scratch, what would it look like?
you’d enter slowly. silence built into the program, not just sound. a space designed around deep listening-the event isn’t the noise, it’s the attention. pauline oliveros understood this. i’d make a room where listening is the headline act.
what’s your ultimate „drop everything and dance“ track?
idioteque.
how does your background or environment influence your sound?
i grew up inside four languages and years in syria, between armenian los angeles and the diaspora. my whole life has been lived on a border – antevasin, the one who lives at the edge. you can hear it in the microtones, in the spaces between languages where the meaning leaks out. i don’t really write in one tongue. i write in the gap.
which piece of gear would you save if your studio burned down?
My hard drives.
do you have a secret production trick that shouldn’t actually work?
Realtor’s Metaphysical Function
which sample would you never give away?
a recording of the air in syria durinng a call to prayer. sacred.
analog or digital – and why?
Both! But obviously i’ say analog but alllllso i refuse the binary. it’s a superposition both until you decide to collapse it. i use whatever tells the truth that day.
what producer hack gave you the biggest „aha“ moment?
stop quantizing my intral rhythm & voice. the timing people around me tried to keep „correcting“ was the actual meaning. My nuance. the human drift is the information.
what’s next for you – and what’s completely new about it?
LIVE LIVE LIVE
if you had to collaborate tomorrow with an artist from a completely different genre, who would it be?
Bill Viola.
imagine it’s 2030, you’re playing your dream set – where is it and what’s the last track you play?
somewhere with real resonance- a cave, a salt flat at night, a building that’s been listening for a thousand years. and the last track isn’t a track. i stop, and we listen to the room after. whatever’s still ringing. that’s the ending.
K Á R Y Y N
SHARES NEW ALBUM ‘PHYSICS UNIVERSAL LOVE LANGUAGE (PULL)’ WITH LEAD SINGLE ‘ELSEWHEN’
KÁRYYN shares her 10-track new album ‘PHYSICS UNIVERSAL LOVE LANGUAGE (PULL)’, via Mute. The project is the latest work from the Syrian-Armenian-American singer, producer, and composer whose music exists at the intersection of sound, spirit, and physics. Across ‘PHYSICS UNIVERSAL LOVE LANGUAGE (PULL)’, KÁRYYN constructs what she describes as “emotional architecture”: music designed not simply to describe feeling, but to conduct it.
The album arrives following the release of ‘COLLAPSE PHASE’ and ‘END TO KNOWING YOU’, which together introduce the record’s emotional and sonic universe while drawing acclaim from Pitchfork, METAL, Glamcult, Kaltblut, The Line of Best Fit, and more. KÁRYYN also recently appeared on the cover of MusicTech Magazine and was highlighted by Women Moving The Needle alongside Lola Young. Both singles arrived alongside videos conceived by KÁRYYN and directed by Jenna Marsh, whose collaborators include Charli XCX and Eartheater, and produced by Black Dog Films.
Latest single ‘ELSEWHEN’ unfolds as a pop mantra about nonlinear time, emotional distance, and the grief of being misunderstood. Across the track, KÁRYYN performs the failure of language in real time, rearranging words as she searches for a way to say what she means.
“The verses don’t describe the search — they are the search,” KÁRYYN explains. “I need a new alphabet, a brand new vocabulary, enough to say how sad I’ve been, how alone.” Words collapse and rebuild throughout the song, reaching toward emotions the existing language can’t fully contain.
At its core, ‘ELSEWHEN’ captures the dislocation of understanding a relationship long before the other person does — and the distance that remains when understanding finally arrives too late. “One day years from now you might wake up,” she sings, “just know that I was there years from where you are.” Less a plea than a transmission from another timeline, the track imagines love continuing to echo long after separation.
Described by KÁRYYN as “not an inquiry but a conclusion rendered in sound,” ‘PHYSICS UNIVERSAL LOVE LANGUAGE (PULL)’ distills years of exploration into intimacy, perception, time, and transformation. Inspired equally by quantum physics and spiritual philosophy, the album proposes that the same invisible forces shaping the cosmos also govern memory, connection, and human relationships. “PULL is about the invisible forces that hold us, break us, and pull us back together,” KÁRYYN says. “It’s a framework for understanding my relationship with Self. This record is the sound of my human revolution.”
Built from voice, strings, modular synths, and gravitational rhythms tuned to 432Hz, the album incorporates arrangements informed by Armenian and Middle Eastern musical traditions, woven subtly through rhythm and melody. KÁRYYN’s voice remains the centre throughout, shifting between fragility, intensity, and control as the music moves between intimate and expansive states. Executive produced by KÁRYYN and James Ford, the album was co-produced with Hudson Mohawke, with additional production from Jacques Greene, Steve Nalepa, Luca Perry, and Duncan Fuller. String arrangements and performances come from Raven Bush, alongside qanun performances by internationally acclaimed Syrian musician Maya Youssef. The album was mixed by Marta Salogni and mastered by Joker.
At its core, ‘PHYSICS UNIVERSAL LOVE LANGUAGE (PULL)’ is an album about collapse, courage, renewal, and emotional clarity, tracing the invisible forces that break us apart and pull us back together again. “I went hunting for dark matter,” KÁRYYN says. “Instead I found brilliance, light, and potential.”
and then 